Star Trek

Maybe I waited too long to see it and had my expectations set too high by other people's positive reviews or maybe I am just an old crumugeny Star Trek fan that is never satisfied.  After seeing the new Star Trek movie last night, my first reaction was a resounding "Meh."  As an action movie, it was pretty darn good.  I enjoyed the acting and the casting, even if every time I saw new-Spock, I thought of Heroes.  The special effects were pretty darn good, though at a couple of times I thought they were a bit overblown.   I certainly enjoyed the internal references to the Star Trek universe like "Admiral Archer's Beagle" and Pike ending the movie in a wheelchair (and the countless others I missed or forgot).

 

I guess I have three major spolierific problems with the movie that really left an ashen taste in my mouth:

 

1)         Red Matter.  Hey, this is the Star Trek universe and we need a plot device, so let's create a particle or substance out of thin air to drive the story.  Throw us a bone, and at least have old-Spock throw away one line on giving us a description of what it is.  Like "Red Matter, a concentrated matrix of graviton particles suspended in an anti-matter matter containment field" or some such!

 

2)         Time.  Hey, this is the Star Trek universe and we need a plot device, so let's mess with the Space-Time continuum!  I get it.  They need some device to pull the Star Trek movie off canon and reboot the series.  I am okay with that, really.  But then leave it alone.  There was just too much old-Spock telling new-Spock what to do and how to do it.   I like Nemoy's Spock.  I like that he was part of the movie and bridged the two.  I think they relied on that too much.

 

3)         And the worst.  Captain Cadet!  Yes folks, we are going to take someone who has not even graduated from the appropriate learning institution and make him the leader of 1000 people!  I am okay with a Lord of the Flies like "young people stepping up and taking command" atmosphere.  I am even okay with the "oops, how did we get here" motif (a la Space Camp!); but it is simply too unbelievable to take a military structure and stretch it to allow for a cadet to jump 6 or 8 promotions to Captain in one day.  When I saw that Spock had the rank of Commander while everyone else was still a cadet, I knew we were in trouble. 

             Compare Kirk's elevation to Uhura's.  Uhura's made sense.  A commissioned officer couldn't do what Uhura could, so she was asked to step up and do the task she was trained to do.  But, she started her Enterprise voyage down in the communication pool like any other low-ranking person.  

             Sure, from a military perspective, Star Trek is full of cases when Kirk or Picard or someone is not 'following orders.' And sometimes they get away with it, and sometimes they do not.  If this were 1600 and not 2300, and you could buy a command, I would be okay with a young Kirk stepping onto the bridge of the Enterprise.  Even if it were his natural charisma and leadership that made everyone look to him in crisis, that might have helped (a little), but Pike turning and saying to Kirk "You are the new first officer" was too much to handle.  The elevation of new-Kirk to Captain just blows any and all credibility out of the water and took me out of the movie.

 

So, I guess I am just like all the other Trek nerds and would rather complain than enjoy.  I can't quote the inconsistencies between In a Mirror, Darkly; Mirror, Mirror and Crossover.  I can't tell you the first ship that old-Kirk served aboard (without looking it up on Wikipedia at least), but I have watched a lot of, and enjoyed most of, the Star Trek universe.  This movie just left me going "Meh."